


Miss Manners Would Not Approve

by Truth



Category: Clue (movie)
Genre: Blackmail, Gen, Spoilers, Violence, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:amalcolm1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-26
Updated: 2010-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 21:42:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at Wadsworth, taking off from the answer given to Professor Plum's question in the third ending: "Well who did I shoot, then?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miss Manners Would Not Approve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amalcolm1](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=amalcolm1).



  


## Miss Manners Would Not Approve

  
Fandom: [Clue (movie)](http://yuletidetreasure.org/get_fandom_quicksearch.cgi?Fandom=Clue%20\(movie\))

  
Written for: amalcolm1 in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge

by [Truth](http://yuletidetreasure.org/cgi-bin/contact.cgi?filename=25/missmanners)  


Really, it had been a truly wonderful plan, a thing of beauty. Mr. Boddy was very fond of it, in point of fact, and said so.

"If it's such a wonderfully beautiful plan," came the acid rejoinder from where Wadsworth sat at the other end of the kitchen table, polishing the heavy silver teapot purchased with the ill-gotten gains of his employer, "why're you pulling the plug on it?"

"My dear Wadsworth," Boddy replied, looking up from his snifter of brandy, "you really must learn to look at the big picture."

"What big picture?" Wadsworth glared at him over the silver. "You backed a bunch of mugs into a corner, took them for all they could pay and now what? They're out of money, you're out of patience... why not just turn them over to the cops anyway?"

"You have absolutely no appreciation for the finer things in life," Boddy chided him, smiling widely. "They may not have money, but there are other things which they could give me, given the proper impetus, that is."

"... so you're going to throw them a party?" Wadsworth set the teapot down with a thud. "What's that supposed to acheive?"

"Careful with the silver," Boddy told him, ignoring the question. "It dents, you know."

"Yeah, it also loses heat at an amazing rate. You should have china, like everyone else."

Mr. Boddy sighed and swirled his brandy thoughtfully. "You make a _terrible_ butler."

"Well it wasn't _my_ idea, now was it?" Wadsworth glared at him over the tin of silver polish. "I was perfectly happy being a swindler and damn good at it, if I do say so myself."

"You thought too small," Boddy pointed out complacently, reaching for the decanter and pouring himself another small libation.

Thinking too small had never been Wadsworth's problem. Thinking too big was what had landed him in a British jail cell, awaiting deportation at absolute best. He swiped viciously at the tin of silver polish, remembering the cramped and dirty cell and the contempt of his jailers for their American `guest'. All of this had left him ripe for the picking and near desperate with gratitude when an unknown benefactor had decided to pay for his paperwork to be misfiled.

"Yeah, thinking too small, that's my undoing." Wadsworth growled at his clouded reflection on the side of the teapot before scrubbing at the metal. "So you're going to have a party... here?"

"You sound enchanted at the prospect," Boddy observed, smiling again. "But no, much as the thought amuses me, I think somewhere more anonymous would be a far better choice."

"So a house party then?" Wadsworth was becoming interested in spite of himself. Of the pair of crooks, he was the swindler - Boddy had always been more hands off. He ran a very profitable black market circle with a sideline in war profiteering before he'd decided England was becoming too hot to hold him.

Picking up an American to help show him the ropes and heading off to pastures new, Boddy had set himself up just outside of Washington D.C. as an eccentric British millionaire - complete with devoted butler. Not that Wadsworth was all _that_ devoted, but being a wanted man in two countries gave him new appreciation for the words `low key'. Thus, Boddy had the upper hand.

`Never give a blackmailer _anything_.' Words to live by.

Wadsworth loathed being `the help'. He hated being polite to the occasional guest, he hated the uniform, he hated the housework - although there were maids for most of that. He scrubbed angrily at the silver, watching the cloudy surface turn to a bright shine as he wiped away the polish, and waited for an answer.

"Yesssss." Boddy drew the word out into a satisfied hiss, leaning back in his chair and reaching for one of the cigars that were lying neatly beside the brandy. "I do believe that's precisely what I had in mind. I'll draft a letter, Wadsworth... and we'll have to get you some appropriate clothing."

"Me?" Wadsworth glanced down at the impeccable suit and brightly shined shoes which made up his uniform with surprise. "What's wrong with this?"

"Ah, but you're not going to be the butler at my little party." Boddy's smile was brighter now, and Wadsworth felt a faint prickle of discomfort at the nape of his neck.

"Not one of the guests." Wadsworth's bad feeling was growing and his rejection was almost automatic.

"No, of course not." Boddy raised his snifter in mocking salute. "As our genial host."

**

Wadsworth had a careful schedule that he followed to the letter every weekday. Being the butler might have been degrading, but it had its perks. Boddy had a full staff for the house and all Wadsworth really had to do was oversee. A few errands, however, he reserved for himself - or Boddy reserved them for him.

The most important of these errands was to visit the mail forwarding service that handled the delivery of Boddy's payments from his victims. Today, however, Wadsworth did not move to address the clerk at the window, instead making his way to the little curtained booth where a public phone was kept tactfully hidden. It had been four days since Mr. Boddy's first set of invitations had been sent, and Wadsworth had the second, more detailed set, ready for mailing today.

The crumpled piece of paper he extracted from an inside pocket showed a great deal of wear and tear. He'd been carrying it with him for almost three years now, knowing that the most valuable tool in the swindler's arsenal is the card you keep up your sleeve. Only the amateurs resorted to actual cheating until there was no other choice and Wadsworth was far from an amateur.

Lifting the receiver, he took a deep breath and spoke to the operator. "Yeah, I need to place a call to Washington D.C."

Two minutes later, he waited impatiently for the party at the other end to pick up, counting off the time he had left before his errand might be looked at as suspicious.

"Hello?"

"Ah, `Mr. Green'." For once, Boddy's little games with anonymity would pay off. "You're in luck." The frozen silence at the other end of the line had him smiling, albeit with a ugly twist. "Come on now, is that any way to greet the man with the answer to all of your problems?"

"You _are_ all my problems." The man at the other end of the line hissed. "My life is a complete misery because of you."

"No," Wadsworth contradicted him cheerfully. "I'm not taking the blame for this one. Just because you weren't smart enough to immediately report your wallet stolen, you're paying a blackmailer to hide the fact that it was found beneath a glory hole in the washroom of a theater with an unsavory reputation." He paused while indignant noises, somewhat unsuccessfully muffled, came from the earpiece of the phone. "Or is it the description of what went on just _before_ you dropped your wallet that you're paying to hide? If that's the case, it's truly a shame. A talent like that should be celebrated as widely as possible."

There was an outright squawk of outrage from `Mr. Green' and Wadsworth decided to take pity on his victim. "Look, I'm not the man you're paying off. He's a nasty piece of work, take it from me, and he's planning something big. I want out."

"... and you expect _me_ to help _you_?"

"No." Wadsworth pulled out his watch and glanced at it, frowning. "I expect you to be grateful that I'm about to give _you_ a way out. You're the only one of his victims that I _know_ and I don't have much time... and neither do you. Listen carefully."

It wasn't in Wadsworth's nature to trust other people, particularly people as idiotic as `Mr. Green'. Unfortunately, as he'd confessed to the unhappy young man, this was his only real hope. Mr. Boddy kept his entire operation very carefully compartmentalized. Wadsworth knew only one or two of the other informants and none of the other victims. He'd given the young government official over to Boddy after finding his wallet on the floor, hoping that such a ripe pigeon to be plucked would convince Boddy to upgrade him from patsy to partner.

Of course, this had meant telling Boddy exactly what _he'd_ been doing in that run-down men's room with the notorious glory hole... and hadn't that been a conversation he'd rather forget.

No such luck and, really, Wadsworth had known it wouldn't be as easy as that. But it gave him a foothold of sorts. Boddy was a smug, over-confident bastard and, this time, Wadsworth wasn't going to let him get away with it. Promising `Mr. Green' an alibi if he stepped forward, taking the case to the FBI and claiming that he'd been afraid of losing his job despite his wallet having been `stolen', had been flimsy, but the guy's gullibility was how he'd fallen victim to Mr. Boddy in the first place.

Something ugly was coming up, and Wadsworth wanted out.

When he returned to the lavish house that Boddy called home, Wadsworth nearly tripped over the doorsill. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, attired in an exact replica of Wadsworth's own pristine white and sober black, was Mr. Boddy.

The mail slithered between Wadsworth's fingers and ended up scattered across the tile floor as he stared, transfixed at Boddy's transformation.

"Not bad for a rush job." Boddy turned in place, craning his neck to peer vainly over one shoulder. "What do you think?"

Wadsworth thought that it looked like a custom job with nothing rushed about it, and felt the sinking feeling in his stomach increase. Whatever Boddy was up to, he'd been planning it for some time now - well before he brought it up so very casually to Wadsworth over a tin of silver polish. "So you've been bitten by a sudden desire to play servant to your misbegotten victims?" He knelt to retrieve the mail, mind racing. "Planning on slipping something in their sherry?"

The pause before answering was just a shade too long for Wadsworth's comfort, and he glanced up to see Boddy giving him a thoughtful frown. "What an imagination you have," he retorted, a broad smile immediately replacing the frown. "No, we're going to have a nice, quiet dinner and a brief discussion of financial matters over brandy. All very civilized, really."

"Civilized." Wadsworth placed the mail on the table, letting his eyebrows climb.

"It would be the height of bad taste to poison one's guests," Boddy pointed out, the very picture of offended virtue. "Miss Manners frowns on such behavior."

"I thought _I_ was going to be the host of this little get-together?" Wadsworth folded his arms, eyebrows still raised. "And I'd wager Miss Manners would have something to say on the heading of `blackmail', when it comes right down to it."

"It's all a matter of nuance." Boddy waved a hand in airy dismissal. " _You_ wouldn't poison them, would you? And, in the spirit of what is and isn't appropriate, isn't it time for tea?"

"Right. Tea." Giving Boddy a dubious look, Wadsworth left him with the mail, moving to put the kettle on. Today's phone call had obviously been in the nick of time. With luck, and it would take a great deal of luck to prod the mouse-like `Mr. Green' into action, he wouldn't find out first hand exactly what deviltry Boddy had planned for his helpless victims.

Sadly, Wadsworth's luck was apparently not up to the somewhat Herculean task of getting `Mr. Green' up to the starting gate in the matter of confronting the authorities in regards to his being blackmailed. Thus it was that he found himself bidding Mr. Boddy good-bye on the fateful night of the dinner party with escape not yet in sight. While there was nothing preventing him from simply taking to his heels, Wadsworth was a realist. Boddy hadn't gotten this far without taking double and triple precautions and the only really safe way out was to make certain that Boddy himself was safely behind bars or dead.

Dead would be Wadsworth's own preference. His bad feelings concerning the upcoming party had not ebbed, particularly with Boddy making all the arrangements himself. He always had Wadsworth doing the legwork for any really large project, and what preparations could be so important that Boddy absolutely _had_ to take care of them himself? Wadsworth made a mental resolution not to drink anything at the dinner party.

Wadsworth found himself smiling wryly as he closed the door and went, not to the car that had been hired for the evening, but instead to the telephone. If Miss Manners disapproved of mass murder, she was hardly likely to smile on his _own_ plans for the evening, but with his backup plan apparently fallen through, Wadsworth was going to have to take steps.

Yet another visit to the convenience address had Wadsworth in possession of a heavy black case that had cost him quite a bit of the small salary that Boddy paid him. The contents weren't something he'd wanted the blackmailer to stumble across. The neatly wrapped packages weren't, after all, for him.

After a moment's hesitation, he went again to the curtained phone and dialed a number - this time from memory. "Hello, police? Yes, I'd like to report a crime...."

As a rather non-plussed Sergeant took down the details provided by Wadsworth, Mr. Boddy was humming a rather pleasant little tune to himself, despite the lingering smell caused by someone's treading a little too close to the dogs leashed outside the main entrance. Things were progressing nicely, all things considered. One way or another everything would be settled by the end of the night and it gave him a warm, satisfied feeling somewhere in the pit of his stomach.

Of course, it would be rather a blow to lose Wadsworth. Boddy stopped to straighten his waistcoat and heaved a genuine sigh of regret. Best not to dwell on the unpleasant side of things. He could find another partner in crime - servant in crime, if he wanted to be strictly correct. It was doubtful that they'd be as satisfactory as Wadsworth, but sometimes sacrifices had to be made.

   
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